Wes Kandel is back to show us how to combine geometric shapes made in Illustrator and then imported and animated in After Effects to create his very cool Geometrika piece.
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Requirements: Adobe Illustrator (download trial version here)
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Barry May 18th
Great work!
( )Barry May 18th
Very nice!
( )Adrien Peze May 18th
I love it!!!! great tuto!!
( )Tobias May 18th
Wow! This looks very clever!
( )sizn May 18th
wow…….gooooooooooood………..:)
( )Ricardo May 18th
This looks really good. Haven’t checked out the entire tutorial yet, but I’m sure trying it whenever I can. Thanks!
( )James Twyman May 18th
very very cool. I can see a lot of different ways to apply this. cheers
( )Antonio Caldas May 18th
Great tutorial, Wes. Thanks for sharing it!
( )Greetings from Brazil.
luantran May 18th
Nice
( )ninjtso May 18th
very nice work ,,,,, i really like it
( )Wesley Prince May 18th
this is what i call creativity!!!
keep up the good work man
( )Sal May 18th
Wes,
Great tut & great technique. Thanks for sharing.
( )Roald André Pedersen May 18th
Sweet!
( )Loay May 18th
Thanks Alot
( )Marcus May 18th
Nice work. Thank you for sharing your techniques.
( )Wes Kandel May 20th
Hey Marcus – I just took a look at your reel. Nice work!
( )saqi May 18th
cool!
( )Travis May 18th
I’m impressed, I will try this later on today. Keep up the good work AE-TUTS.
( )Adam Everett May 18th
Great flow… very nicely done!
( )mehmet akif soyertaş May 18th
Nice work. Cool!
( )Matthias May 18th
what music is used?
( )Nice Tutorial!
Wes Kandel May 18th
The song is called “Bring It On” by Steve Aoki.
( )Rafi May 18th
isn’t this song by “goose”?
Wes Kandel May 18th
Maybe the original version but this mix was done by Steve Aoki… unless iTunes is lying to me.
Daniel Correia May 20th
Pretty cool tune! Thanks.
Peter Somers May 25th
The song is “Bring It On” by belgian band GOOSE.
And if Keoki edited it, then the changes are minimal. It actually sounds EXACTLY the same as the original.
So either iTunes is lying, or Keoki is trying to get credit where it’s not due!!
Paul May 18th
Whats the music??
( )Ruz May 18th
Thanks a lot, very nice tutorial!
( )vasu May 18th
good work dude
( )dotcom May 18th
Vive les Suisses et leur design !
( )cheers.
arnodotcom.
Rafi May 18th
DUUUUDE! I am Swiss and he is SWEDISH! Why do people (almost only us americans
) always mix up these two countries. Switzerland is not Sweden and Sweden isn’t Switzerland. Switzerland is in Central Europe and has the Alps and Sweeden is a nordic country that’s between Finland and Norway and they’ve got awesome chicks!
( )Jens May 19th
Really like it! Thank you
Im swedish too yey!
:) May 24th
yeah the chicks are awesome!Agree
Matthias May 18th
Thank you really much!
( )Caleb Armstrong May 18th
Awesome! You’re a natural teacher, Wes. And I’m glad that there’s people like you around to show how powerful AE can be in a design aspect as opposed to VFX.
Keep up the great work.
( )bryan berger May 18th
nice tutorial wes, keep it up man
( )Matthew Carlin May 18th
Looks like a damn good tutorial, definitely gonna try this one!
( )Pablo May 18th
Thank you! Please do more! You are really good!
( )JohnM. May 18th
Great Tutorial. I downloaded the entire tut so I could follow along. I got one question though. I added a Radial Ramp and when I export it my background doesn’t look smooth. It has “steps.” How did you export it? Did you render it in Animation then used another program to convert it into .mp4??? Please help.
( )Wes Kandel May 18th
I usually render out a master using Animation and then compress it for whatever delivery format is needed using Quicktime Pro or Compressor. Here’s a screen shot of my compression settings. The thing to pay attention to is your data rate. You’ll want it to be nice and high. Feel free to shoot me an email if you need further explanation.
( )Rev65 May 18th
Excellent job presenting, Wes! Loved that you spent the time setting things up correctly. Your example piece has a great look & vibe. I can see tons of possibilities by adding 3D and playing with the Z space. Thanks for sharing your work!
( )Bryan May 18th
Brilliant tutorial, thanks a a lot,
laughed my ass off at the Bob Ross part because I was thinking the same thing.
Thanks,
( )Bryan
mark May 19th
thanks mate. this is great
( )mitko May 19th
wow man this place is amazing
( )Bonus May 19th
WOW
another one to try , good work Wes.
( )Gabriel May 19th
Could you do something with your bandwidth because it takes for hours to load the video in.
Greetings from Hungary
( )CgBaran Tuts May 19th
Great work thanks
( )Cheha May 19th
How to make referenced to a point in Adobe Illustrator. When the triangles draw!?
( )johanngrunt May 19th
This is great, going to try it out
on a side note, can anyone access this link on the sidebar?
the one on the 12 awesome french short animations
it says it needs a password
http://www.blog.exxcorpio.com/2009/04/20/12-awesome-french-short-animations/
thanks a lot
( )Lloyd May 19th
[EDITOR REPLY] Thanks for catching that, I’ve removed the link.
( )johanngrunt May 19th
so there’s no way to access it?
sad
Richard May 19th
damn good…
( )nirvana May 19th
Yes~~~THKS~~~
( )Tim From Belgium May 19th
Bring it on by Goose,
( )you have very good taste in music and the tut is als wicked!
Chris May 19th
none of the tutorials or the previews load for me… could anyone help?
( )Jim Hines May 19th
Lots of really good stuff in this tutorial and very pleasant presentation style.
Thank you!
( )shme May 19th
great tutorial you really touched on a lot of helpful stuff. i love watching these tutorials to squeeze out the tiny details about AE. you didn’t leave out a thing
( )GARRO May 19th
lol..!!!… “wiggle the crap out of it” best quote ever!
and yes.. very nice tutorial… thanks for making it..
( )Jonathan Cutrell May 19th
Hey, real quick note… AE Scripts (thanks Lloyd) has a script to parent the layers automatically. Kinda helps if you have 20, 30, 200 thousand layers… Whatever.
http://aescripts.com/parent-chain/
This will help cut down on the not-so-creative portion of the work.
( )cz3d May 20th
很好!谢谢老师
( )JohnM. May 20th
Um, Wes? I ran into a problem. When I try to parent the Position of one of my Masters to the Null Object I get an error. Here is a screenshot of my error. What am I doing wrong?
( )Wes Kandel May 20th
Hey John – I’d be glad to take a look at that for you. The screenshot, however, is set to private, so I can’t see it.
( )JohnM. May 20th
Sorry. I’m new to Flicker so I didn’t know. Ok i made it public.
eitan May 20th
wow!!!!!!!!!!!!
( )amazing, one of the best i have seen yet
wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
M.H.Salimi May 20th
Hi Wes . i try to it with ” M ” letter , but when i try to parent the two part of ” M ” ( i mean ” |\ ” & ” /| ” ) i should parent one piece of work with two piece of objects … so can you help me with this ? ( if you don,t understand of problem , tell me for take screen shot )
Thanks for your great tutorial again .
( )i am waiting for answer
Wes Kandel May 20th
Go ahead and send me a screen shot, and I’d be glad to help.
( )M.H.Salimi May 21st
I try other ways so , I think my problem solved .
But i have another question … how you parent all expressions of layers with ” Chaos control ” layer . Do you do it separately for all layers ?
Screen shot , if need : http://i42.tinypic.com/eq9k49.jpg
,Thanks again
M.H.Salimi May 21st
I tried many ways , so , i think my problem solved
But i have another question , How you parent all of expressions of scale and rotations of layers , to ” Chaos control ” ( Minute 29 , Second 23 in tutorial ) ? Do you do it separately for all layers ?
Thanks again for your reply and your great tutorial ,
M.h.Salimi
Brandon May 20th
Wow, even though you showed us basic ground work on how you made this, I learned the most was efficiency and organizing and in depth parenting abilities .
( )kyd May 20th
gooooood!!!
( )Diego SA May 21st
FANTASTIC! This song I’ll have right now!
( )Tim May 21st
ah I hate it! I LOVE this title animation, but I can’t think of anything original to use it for! I wish I came up with this design!
anyway thanks for sharing!
( )Jawaad Ahmad Khan May 21st
Love the tutorial…
( )It’s so cool…I really need to learn illustrator well…cuz this is just an awesome use of it for after effects…
Viktor May 21st
Thanks a lot wanted to know how this effect was done.
( )Kevin May 22nd
Good stuff. Thanks.
When you first are making the triangles in Ai, it looks like you’re using a Snap option to keep the sides of the triangles aligned… what’s that trick?
( )wshwsh00 May 22nd
look good ~~
( )Satya Meka May 23rd
Nice design. But, to make this effect quicker and easy I would suggest using shape layers to have more control on animations.Also, with proper expressions you can skip parenting all the layers imported which saves time and easy to modify something later on ( which I say as alternative). Regardless, wonderful execution.
( )Carlos May 23rd
Awesome tutorial man, love it! Thanks!
( )chrisberthe May 25th
This is sick
Thank you.
( )Jorge May 25th
We need more tuts like this! Great one! Probably the best so far.
( )ThatGuySy May 27th
Can someone help me with the stage involving Illustrator. I don’t really understand, is there a very tiny gap between the triangles, (eg a few pixles) or are they actually touching eachother. If it is the lattar can someone explain how to do it. Thanks!
PS amazing tutorial. keep’em coming!
( )Wes Kandel May 29th
It doesn’t really matter. But if you’re trying to reproduce the exact effect, then the triangles are touching each other. This can be achieved easily in Illustrator CS4 using the “snap to point” option under the view menu. However, I honestly can’t remember if that snapping option was available before CS4.
( )Oscar Dante May 29th
We need more like this. Love it, need to try it out
( )SAJAY May 29th
sIMPLY gREAT..!
( )Niko May 29th
This tut looks awesome, especially love tuts that combine illustrator and after effects.
Alas downloaded the tut in mp4 quicktime. screen goes blank (green) at 1 min 30 seconds.
( )Tom May 30th
nice origami konotation
( )John May 31st
I really liked the final product, absolutely spectacular. But the tutorial was disappointing; finding out you did most of it all manually especially, very inefficient. Also, seemed like you didn’t know what you were doing often throughout the tutorial on the basics. Work on your general presenting skills as well.
( )MEGAFATBOY June 4th
In the tut you said you applied the wiggle expression to make the camera shake, how did you do that to the beat? I have been looking for a solution for a week, how did ya do it?
( )REHMAT HADI.PAKISTAN ...PESHAWAR June 5th
It is the first time i am joining this site and in a very short time i understood it as very creative and more informative site leading the whole community towords a possitive and fruitful direction.The site is very beautful and needs beautifull works as it has to improve and servive its hold on sites..
( )Petter June 6th
Great tut!
( )-Another swed
melleMel June 8th
how do you get the look for the triangles? the flashy transparent look? please and thank you~
( )Wes Kandel June 11th
Make sure your triangle layers are set to add mode.
( )Magua June 14th
Sorry, question here. For some reason, after I’ve made my work in AI and I go to import it into AE as “Cropped Layers”, it’s not actually cropping to the objects in the AI file, but seems to be always bringing it in at whatever the document size is (in this case 1280×720). Is there a setting with the artboards/document size that I should be looking out for? Transparency settings? Thanks!
( )Tiffany June 23rd
top notch! Thank you for showing us this!
( )Alex June 25th
Show !!
( )Krimzon June 25th
GREAT!
who plays the song?
From Sudamerica!
( )Julian July 11th
Wow, this tutorial is incredible. It really shows how simple animations can make an incredible overall effect.
You’re a really good “teacher” too, you should consider making more tutorials. You sound professional, and you have just the right amount of comedy in the video. Not too much that you sound retarded, and not too little that one would fall asleep while watching.
Incredible work, I love the whole thing. Thank you for coming up with such a great idea. I learned a lot about organization, and how to turn simple animations into something incredible. Again, thank you.
( )hacrystal July 16th
hi. Thank you for good tutorial.^^*
I studed this tutorial
I have question~!! Please answer me
You made Scale Control and Rotation Control in”chaos control” Layer
I can’n serch Scale Control and Rotation Control
Where is the control tool?
I’am a beginner.ㅠㅠ
I waitting for your answer.
좋은하루 보내세요^^*
( )Paul September 11th
Hi Wes,
I’m trying to tackle this as my first AE tutorial as I have a future project in mind where I can utilize the possesses you’ve shown here. It’s been going ok so far but I’ve hit a wall when trying to parent a layer master position to a position controller (null object).
I get the following After Effects warning: Object of type layer found where a Number, Array, or Property is needed…
I’m wondering, did you just rename the base triangle layer to master? Are my ai layers saved correctly? Like I said a wall…
Any help, would be very much appreciated. Regards, Paul.
( )Lloyd May 19th
The links are user provided so they would need to resubmit a working link.
( )